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Hip-Hop History, Recreated by Those Who Made It

Snoop Dogg performed at the Rock the Bells festival on Governors Island on Saturday.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

What kind of oldies concert draws a huge audience in its 20s? Rock the Bells, the daylong hip-hop festival that came to Governors Island on Saturday. This year’s Rock the Bells borrowed an idea from the indie-rock festival All Tomorrow’s Parties, booking groups to perform watershed albums in their entirety.

Two headliners, Snoop Dogg and Wu-Tang Clan, largely complied with the assignment. Snoop Dogg brought along most of the guests from his 1993 album, “Doggystyle,” made back when he was Snoop Doggy Dogg. The others — A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-One, Rakim and Slick Rick — went “veering off,” as Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest put it, to play additional hits (which no one minded) or to plug more recent projects.

And then there was the wild card: Lauryn Hill, the singer and rapper formerly of the Fugees, appearing half an hour late. She hasn’t released a studio album since “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1998, and she has recorded and toured only sporadically since then while raising five children. “I miss you,” she told the crowd repeatedly. Partway through the set she pulled guests out of the V.I.P. section and onstage: Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, John Legend. They missed her too.

Ms. Hill’s voice has a raspy edge now; it has left behind the smoothness of Roberta Flack for the bite of Tina Turner. But she has the timing to match, and she threw herself into the performance. Backed by a band that pushed the songs toward rock, Ms. Hill rapped at top speed and belted songs from “Miseducation” and the Fugees’ “Score” with reckless gusto and soul screams.

Rock the Bells also included younger rappers on a side stage, where they performed for club-size audiences at best. But this festival belonged to the elders, who aren’t that old; Rakim, the senior headliner, is 46.

They were anything but decrepit. Seasoned rappers have taken on show-business skills. Snoop Dogg had props — a picnic table with malt-liquor bottles — and blaxploitation-style video clips for the skits from “Doggystyle.” A Tribe Called Quest, whose set drew on its 1993 album, “Midnight Marauders,” now underlines its jazzy, intricate raps with floppy-limbed choreography. The deceptively casual rhymes, mingling sociopolitical observations with lusty chronicles, still sound as smart and far-reaching as they did 17 years ago.

Wu-Tang Clan never seems to have much stagecraft — just a bunch of guys walking around and shouting their polysyllabic allusions, threats and comedy while the bass thuds. But the group put across the songs from its 1993 debut album, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” which transformed hip-hop with its spooky minor-key productions. (It was much harder for hip-hop to follow through on the rhymes’ mixture of densely intellectual constructs and raunch; West Coast gangsta rap won that battle.) Amid the apparent chaos, the right rapper always stepped forward at the right time. Wu-Tang now includes Boy Jones, forcefully taking over the parts of his father, the original Clan member Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who died in 2004.

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There’s a defensive tone to Rock the Bells, an annual festival since 2004: an implication that 21st-century hip-hop has taken a wrong turn into thuggishness, simple-mindedness, formula and triviality. There’s also a promise that its clean-cut young audiences can reclaim authenticity and acquire some historical bona fides.

KRS-One made that explicit during his set, which included only a few songs from Boogie Down Productions’ 1987 album, “Criminal Minded,” and more “education time.” He defined hip-hop as aware (hip) and a movement (hop): “an aware movement, aware of itself.” He also brought fellow members of his hip-hop generation onstage. The blatant hectoring arrived with such righteous energy, and so much verbal skill, that it turned celebratory. Along with positive-thinking material, “Criminal Minded” includes “9mm Goes Bang,” one of the earliest songs to qualify as gangsta rap, a genre KRS-One dislikes. But he performed it, then brought on a guest, Freddie Foxx, who denounced fake thugs for lack of creativity — and then rapped, threatening violence. The dialectic hasn’t ended.

“Doggystyle” codified West Coast gangsta rap, with Snoop Doggy Dogg as a calm, arrogant, woman-despising character amid sleek pop hooks that gave the nastiness a likable veneer. (His video clips had a body count.) The album spawned much of the dull gangsta boasting that Rock the Bells resists. But for Snoop Dogg it has been a lucrative persona; his encores, newer songs, set similar rhymes to more bombastic productions. After nine hours of assertive New York City hip-hop, Snoop Dogg’s set was a dose of California cool; half the audience drifted away.

Rock the Bells chose other important albums. Eric B. and Rakim’s 1987 “Paid in Full” raised hip-hop’s technical ante with stark, un-pop rhythmic intricacy (from the disc jockey Eric B.) and with the complex rhymes that Rakim still delivers with somber intensity; for an encore he wore a black-and-white warm-up suit like the one on the album cover.

“The Great Adventures of Slick Rick,” from 1988, brought tall-tale narratives to hip-hop. Slick Rick diverged from it to perform the song that made his career, “La-Di-Da-Di,” with its original beatboxer (and group leader), Doug E. Fresh. It was a song that Snoop Doggy Dogg would learn from, and remake, on “Doggystyle” — part of Rock the Bells’ history lesson and its nostalgia for hip-hop innovation.

A version of this review appears in print on August 30, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hip-Hop History, Recreated by Those Who Made It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe